T-Minus 6 Hours Until Cardano Catalyst F13 Community Voting
Hello everyone!
Time flies — it’s hard to believe we’re just six hours away from the opening of Community Voting for Fund13. There’s been a whirlwind of changes since our last update, and now that the shortlists for the partner categories are complete, we’re here to bring you up to speed with the latest leaderboard trends and developments across the categories. Let’s dive in:
Developers
- The leaderboard saw some significant movement!
- GameChanger surged into first place, pushing On-Chain Timelock to second. This shift also bumped EduChain out of the top spots, shaking up the competition.
Ecosystem
- Onboarding Indian College Students has remained strong, holding its position on the leaderboard.
- A major shift occurred as Cardano Hub in Nyiragongo took the lead, dethroning the Cardano Euphoria Expo.
Concept
- This category saw the return of some familiar faces.
- Tongue Swap made a comeback, reclaiming the top spot.
- Following close behind, Lost & Found: Simple Example dApp to Introduce Cardano secured second place, shaking things up by pushing out previous top contenders.
Product
- The Product category saw another week of major shake-ups:
- Ada for Salesforce rocketed to first place, making a strong impression.
- Summon: Feedback Polls for Dreps & SPOs rose to second, introducing exciting new possibilities for collaboration and governance tools.
Enterprise R&D
- This space is heating up with a finalized shortlist of 25 projects from an initial pool of 66 proposals.
- With fierce competition and a range of innovative ideas, this category remains wide open — truly anyone’s game!
Growth and Acceleration
- The spotlight is on Draper University x Cardano Founder Residency (Silicon Valley), which jumped to the top as the trending project to watch.
Final Thoughts: We’ve witnessed a wave of shake-ups and surprises as we approach the pivotal voting stage. With the shortlists in partner categories complete, the race is now fully underway. Every vote counts, and your participation will shape the future of these groundbreaking initiatives. Check out a couple of our favorite proposals below! And let the games begin!
Würth it’s weight in gold
The Cardano Partners categories are the latest addition to Catalyst, included with the express purpose of onboarding major players from industries of all types and places. This proposal by Iagon & Würth Group would introduce perhaps the biggest player yet to be proposed. In 2023 alone, Würth handled over $20 Billion in sales, and saw over $1.5 Billion in growth. They’ve been showing steady growth for the past decade plus in a rapidly modernizing world.
Würth is a German company that manufactures, sells, and distributes a wide range of business equipment. They started with fasteners, but have expanded to produce just about anything needed for industrial, construction, automotive, woodworking, and metalworking industries. Crucially for this proposal, one branch (Wurth Additive Group) also works in the 3D printing industry, a space which has been plagued recently by IP theft & circumvention.
The plan for this proposal is to use Cardano Smart Contracts and NFTs, and Iagon’s decentralized storage network to create a platform that solves that problem and provides useful utility to IP owners and buyers alike. The approach makes a great deal of technical sense. Iagon is already set up to provide storage for users in a permissioned way, allowing IP owners granular access control without relying on any centralized service. Cardano has multiple NFT royalty standards and marketplaces that can handle a wide variety of use cases. All the pieces fit neatly together — not to say there won’t be challenges, but the proposal just makes sense. It feels very natural.
Würth’s interest in Cardano bodes extremely well for the ecosystem. They’re the exact sort of enterprise-level customer that will actually drive adoption to Cardano, playing to the strengths of the ecosystem with a clear use case to bring volume to the chain. They’ve also chosen a great partner to join with. Iagon has rapidly become a mainstay of the ecosystem, gaining respect and appreciation in every corner of Cardano. This is a partnership that promises great things!
Cars on Chain
Continuing in the vein of real world use cases that are taking advantage of blockchain for its ability to solve unsolved problems, here’s a great proposal for solving myriad of issues around car ownership. Putting Vehicle Titles & Records onchain. To accomplish this Atlas Innovations, Saleen Automotive, Auto News & Pierre Auto Group have teamed up to provide a system for tracking car history and ownership onchain from the onset of a cars lifespan.
We think this is a great idea, as the types of fraud that having an immutable, decentralized record of a car’s history & ownership helps prevent falls into two broad categories: historical and financial. Historical fraud can look like a lot of different things: VIN swapping, title washing or simply leaving information out are all extremely easy ways to lie to a potential buyer. Financial fraud generally exploits the non-immediate nature of large purchases in the existing banking system. Allowing the transfer the title to shift with the transfer of the currency solves that problem outright.
These issues particularly plague the used car market (especially dealerships), but in order to be most effective systems have to be put in place for new cars as well.
The team here is perfect for that. Saleen is a high-worth performance car manufacturer, well known for its custom Ford Mustang editions and other performance packages. Pierre Auto Group is one of the largest retailers of high-worth performance vehicles in America. Together they have potential to reach all types of cars — used new and custom. But they especially reach a demographic that cares a whole lot about their vehicles integrity and authenticity, auto enthusiasts. Making this solution ripe for quick adoption.
As a disclaimer: we have worked with Atlas and Saleen before; however, we think that should be seen as a positive because we can speak to their quality of work these guys are really know what they’re doing, and they’re passionate about it. We’re excited to see where they take things!
